Infrastructural Appliances

In his keynote speech at Macworld Expo in
January 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared that the PC was not
dead, just boring--and that Apple would cease to make their PCs
boring by making them ``hubs'' for people's ``digital lifestyles''.
To illustrate, he showed a PC circled by a posse of mostly portable
devices that record and play back sound and video: CD player, MP3
player, DVD player, camcorder, etc. The idea was to turn the PC
into a personal entertainment storage and production appliance. The
term ``personal'' was his. The term ``appliance'' is mine. It's
hard to reconcile Steve's ``art'' (and margins) with a word we
associate with Hoover and Mr. Coffee.

But, it's beginning to become clear that appliance is to
hardware what application is to software. Both tend to have
singular purposes. I don't know about you, but ``hub'' seems like
it has a rather singular purpose to me. Rhetoric aside, it's smart
positioning on Steve's part. The more connected everything gets,
the more purposeful every connected device becomes.

In the same keynote Steve reported on the progress of Apple's
new operating system, OS X. The X stands both for the numeral ten
and the last letter of UNIX. The OS itself is called Darwin, and
it's basically BSD with a Mach kernel. There's a lot of proprietary
UI and development software that Apple layers on top of Darwin for
use in its boxes, but it's Darwin that makes OS X not only native
to the Net but also to the guild of infrastructural masons we call
the UNIX community. Apple opened the source code to Darwin almost
two years ago, but the OS wasn't very interesting to the UNIX guild
as long as Apple's source code license basically restricted all the
useful benefits to Apple.

But then OS X Beta came out in the Fall of 2000, and lots of
builders went at it. By the time Steve made his speech in January,
Apple had a new source code license that was functionally open:
anybody could take Darwin and do what they wanted with it. Thus
Apple came into compliance with reality, which is
infrastructure--the buzzword to bet on.

For context, let's go back in history to the PC Era, when
computing was personal. Back then we came up with another
structural buzzword: platforms, which were the combinations of
operating systems and hardware on which applications ran. Now those
platforms have to run on the Internet. And as more new applications
run on the Net, platforms become extensions of Internet
infrastructure. This is what happened to Apple. It's also what
happened last year to IBM when it declared its love for Linux. In
both cases management agreed to comply with their own engineers and
the larger guild of UNIX masons who are busy building the
world.

Builders of all kinds, whether of houses or software, like to
work with commodities. And the fact is, we always build
infrastructure with commodities, whether we're talking about 2 x 4s
and sheetrock or TCP/IP and Linux.

Yes, Linux.

It is rapidly becoming clear that Linux is commodity
infrastructure. That's why it's no longer much to brag about. It's
like saying, ``this car is made with metal.'' Of course, Linux and
other free and open UNIX variants (like Darwin) aren't the only
commodities. So are 32-bit processors for every
application/appliance. Linux is rapidly adapting to nearly all of
them, thanks in large part to the embedded Linux toolchain vendors.
Countless other components and connecting technologies are also
commoditized. So the supply infrastructure is making it possible
for more and more companies to get into the networked appliance
business and for established companies to create and iterate
prototypes.

One interesting effect of this is the emergence--like
crystals out of chemicals in the right conditions--of appliances
that are themselves infrastructure. This is what Cobalt pioneered
by taking a highly commoditized business--Linux-based servers--and
productizing them as ``server appliances''. They took commodity
infrastructure and productized it, giving it appliance-like ease of
configuration, installation, operation and, of course, sales. It
was easy for Cobalt to sell a database-in-a-box to ISPs who could
slide it into a rack and in turn sell it--again, as a product--to
their customers.

Sun Microsystems understood this, which is why they paid $2
billion US for Cobalt. (For more, see our interview on page 8 with
Cobalt CEO Stephen DeWitt, who is now vice president and general
manager of Sun's Server Appliance Business Unit.) They saw how the
world of network infrastructure--Sun's native habitat--was going to
turn increasingly into an appliance business.

In Invisible Computer, Don Norman
predicted that buggy, crashy, hard-to-use PCs would gradually be
replaced by functionally purposeful and easy-to-use appliances. Now
it's looking like he was right. Even about PCs.

Doc
Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal and a
coauthor of The Cluetrain
Manifesto.

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